When Popular Culture Caught Up to the Way We Live Now

[Commentary] When did the world in which we now live take fully recognizable shape? I suspect that most middle-age Americans would point to 1968, the annus horribilis when Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. But it was in 1962, not 1968, that the curtain first started inching up on our age of full-color anxiety. Turn the clock back exactly a half-century and you'll find yourself in a different America—but one fraught with subtle signs and portents of what was to come.